Privacy Policy

All the latest evidence suggests the UK may be moving into a new golden age for car theft.

Government figures recently revealed that total car thefts (TCF) were up almost 10% YoY. Cars with no keys have played a key role in this dramatic car-nick uptick.

Models

Back in the bad old days when cars mostly had the keys of the kind that have teeth – and with which things can be locked – TCF had dropped as low as the 70,000 mark (2013/4). But now, with more and more models dispensing with old-fashioned analogue keys, around 115,000 motors go missing each year.

Back in those days, only Range Rovers and other such ‘premium’ vehicles came keyless, but now, when even Ford Fiestas have outgrown the humble key, there’s a vast array of models from which bleeping criminals can take their pick.

Sensational

Now insurer body ABI claims car theft insurance payouts have risen by more than 20%, thus soaring to a sensational seven-year high.

And paying insurance claims doesn’t come cheap. Forking out for all those missing motors cost insurers a whopping £1.2bn in the first quarter of 2019, the ABI claims.

Body

Today’s tech-wielding vehicle thieves, the insurer body reckons, can get into your car in as little as 20 seconds. That’s almost eight minutes fewer than it takes to soft-boil a standard hen’s egg – which, coincidentally, is the same as the average time that elapses between one motor insurance theft claim getting paid and the one after it.

Exciting

Not only is exciting new technology making cars easier to pinch, it’s also making them more expensive to patch up post prang. No wonder motor insurers spend so much time railing bitterly about how cars just aren’t the classic key-operated thin-skinned death-trap tins they used to be and ‘why must it all be so complicated?’

They probably don’t do that really. But Bankstone News senses this story has probably achieved an adequate length now, and wonders absent-mindedly who could possibly blame it for lapsing into contrafactual incoherence. Surely no one reads these things right down to the final line, do they?